This link is making its appearance on some blogs and e-lists: Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications (I saw the first one on Peter's site). NB: If you don't have Windows, don't bother. The manual is a self-extracting compiled help (.CHM) doc. But if you do have Windows, the only two reasons I can think of for downloading it are 1) you need to write manuals to M$ specifications, or 2) you'll use it as source material for some research project.

I suspect that people who have need of it for reason #2 will be more successful. Maybe it's just my knee-jerk M$ bias, but I found myself wondering how useful 1Mb worth of index entries really is as a style guide. I'm happy to hear that M$ prefers "e-mail" so that it is consistent with "e-commerce" and retains the "electronic mail" origin (no, not really, I'm being sarcastic...I like "email" thank you). But can you imagine being a new tech writer in Redmond? Sure the campus is nice (and the store discounts are great), but good luck doing a compliant manual!

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